As part of the LBAT, our group gets to make a few visits to businesses in Shanghai. We recently visited bao steel; I would be making an understatement if I said that it was any less than incredibly interesting. When our bus arrived at Bao Steel they told us a little about the history of the company, including the fact that they are the second biggest steel producer in the world! Then as soon as we stepped off the bus we were each handed a hard hat, and walked into their factory to watch the process of producing steel.

Hot steel

Cooling the steel

Their factory appeared to be several massive warehouses. Once inside we went up a couple of flights of stairs to observe the steel production from a catwalk lining the buildings. The man giving us a tour of bao steel had said that it should be a relatively nice day to tour the factory because it wasn’t too hot and their steel production could get to be extremely hot. However, as we walked into the warehouse it was like walking into a wall of heat. And this was cool for them!

The finished steel roll

We watched the part of steel production where they took a huge, red-hot block of steel and thinned it out to be paper-thin, then cooled the steel, and finally bent it into giant rolls of steel. Seeing the red-hot steel pass us and go through various machines, giving off tremendous blasts of smoke, was pretty cool, to say the least. At one point, a really long thinned-out sheet of steel passed by us and you could feel the heat radiating off of it on our skin several seconds later!

Overall, the tour was extremely interesting, and I think we all got some pretty cool pictures of the steel being produced, including this group picture of us outside of the factory.